Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 31.djvu/152

 being usually settled by Attorney-general Yorke and Solicitor-general Talbot.

Nevertheless King established some important legal principles, e.g. that a will of English land, though made abroad, must be made according to the formalities of English law; and that, where a husband had a legal title to his wife's personal estate, a court of equity would not help him to ‘reduce it into possession’ without compelling him to settle a part of it upon her, which did something to mitigate the harshness of the old law. He was the author of the act which substituted English for Latin as the language of writs and similar documents, and also of the statute 12 Geo. I, c. 32, which, by requiring masters in chancery to pay all sums deposited with them in their official capacity into the Bank of England as soon as received, rendered impossible a recurrence of the frauds perpetrated during Lord Macclesfield's tenure of office. He is charged by Whiston, whom he had offended by refusing to join his Society for Promoting Primitive Christianity, with being wholly guided by worldly considerations in dispensing church patronage, and with justifying subscription by unbelievers on the ground that ‘we must not lose our usefulness for scruples’ (, Memoirs, pt. i. pp. 35, 162). As a minister he made no considerable figure. He was an F.R.S., a friend of Newton and one of his pall-bearers, a governor of the Charterhouse, a member of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts and of a commission for the building of new churches.

A paralytic stroke compelled King to resign the great seal on 19 Nov. 1733. He was offered a pension of 4,000l., or a capital sum of 20,000l., and chose the latter. He died on 22 July 1734 at his seat at Ockham, and was buried in the parish church, where a splendid monument by Rysbrach perpetuates his memory. Lord Hervey has left a clever and ill-natured character, or perhaps caricature, of him in his ‘Memoirs,’ i. 280–1; an extravagant panegyric by the Duke of Wharton, written while he was still lord chief justice of the common pleas, will be found in the ‘True Briton,’ No. xxxix. (See also an absurd adulatory ‘Letter to the Right Honourable the Lord Chief Justice King on his Lordship's being designed a Peer,’ London, 1725, 4to.) King married, in September 1704, Anne, daughter of Richard Seys of Boverton, Glamorganshire, by whom he had four sons—John, Peter, William, and Thomas—and two daughters. Each of his sons in turn succeeded to the title. King's portrait by Daniel de Coning, painted in 1720, is in the National Portrait Gallery.

In 1702 King published a ‘History of the Apostles' Creed: with Critical Observations on its several Articles.’ It was received more favourably abroad than at home, and was highly praised in Bernard's ‘Nouvelles de la République des Lettres’ (November and December 1702). A Latin translation by Gottfried Olearius was published at Leipzig in 1706, and reprinted at Basel in 1750. Later English editions appeared in 1703, 1711, 1719, and 1737. This, the first attempt to trace the evolution of the creed, gave a great impulse to research, and determined the main lines upon which it was to be conducted. The creed, according to King, was originally a baptismal formula, which varied in different churches, and did not assume its present shape till four centuries after the close of the apostolic age. Later writers (see, Creeds of the Greek and Latin Churches, p. 52) have given 750 as the approximate date. John Simson, professor of divinity in Glasgow, accused of Arianism in 1727, tried to shelter himself behind some words in King's ‘History.’ King made no reply to this misrepresentation of his views, but was defended in a ‘Vindication’ by an anonymous author in 1731. Joseph Bingham in his ‘Antiquities’ frequently refers to King, and with invariable respect, though without accepting all his conclusions.

In 1712 and 1713 King published a second edition of his early ‘Enquiry,’ with a second part treating of ceremonies and worship. The book, though intended to promote the comprehension of the dissenters, is impartial and critical. A correspondence with [q. v.] upon liturgical forms, occasioned by the first edition, is printed in Elys's ‘Letters on several Subjects’ (1694). In 1717 King was attacked by the anonymous author of ‘The Invalidity of the Dissenting or Presbyterian Ordination,’ and by William Sclater, a nonjuring clergyman, in his ‘Original Draught of the Primitive Church.’ [q. v.], in his ‘Eight Discourses, &c.,’ 1804, declares, but without justification, that King was himself converted by this work. John Wesley in 1746 read the ‘Enquiry,’ and, in spite of his high church prejudices, admitted it to be an ‘impartial draught’ (Journal). It was reprinted in 1839 and 1843, with an abridgment of Sclater by way of antidote, and was not really superseded until the publication in 1881 of the Bampton lectures of [q. v.] on ‘The Organisation of the Early Christian Churches.’

King was erroneously identified by Mosheim with a ‘Mr. K——,’ who defended the legend of the thundering legion in corre-